Much value was set on dying confessions. When the preacher, Robert Bruce, refused to believe the King’s account of the Gowrie tragedy, he said that one proof would satisfy him. Let Andrew Henderson, the man in the turret, be hanged. If he persisted in his confession on the scaffold, Mr. Bruce would believe. The King declined to make this abominable experiment. In Sprot’s case his dying confession did not move the Kirk party. Calderwood hints that Mr. Galloway ‘had the most speech to Sprot on the scaffold,’ and so kept him true to a dying lie. {227a} He adds that Spottiswoode said to Galloway ‘I am afraid this man make us all ashamed,’ that is, by retracting his confessions. Mr. Patrick answered, ‘Let alone, my Lord, I shall warrant him.’ {227b} Had Andrew Henderson swung, constant to his confession, the Presbyterian sceptics would have found similar reasons for disbelief. What are _we_ to believe? Did Sprot go wherever he went with a blasphemous lie in his mouth? A motive for such vehemence of religious hypocrisy is difficult to find. Conceivably he had promise of benefits to his family. Conceivably he was an atheist, and ‘took God in his own hand.’ Conceivably his artistic temperament induced him to act his lie well, as he had a lie to act. Yet all this is not satisfactory. Let us take the unromantic view of common sense. It is this: Logan was a restless, disappointed intriguer and debauchee. He sold his lands, some to acquire a partnership with Lord Willoughby in a vessel trading to America; this vessel, or another, is among his assets recorded in his inventory. All his lands he sold—not that he was in debt, he was a large lender—for purposes of profligacy. These proceedings gave rise to gossip. The Laird must be selling his lands to evade forfeiture. He _must_ have been engaged in the Gowrie mystery. Then Logan dies (July 1606). Bower is also dead (January 1606). It occurs to Sprot that there is money in all this, and, having lost Logan’s business, the hungry Sprot needs money. He therefore makes a pact with some of Logan’s debtors. He, for pay, will clear them of their debts to Logan’s executors, whom he will enable them to blackmail. Logan’s descendants by two marriages were finally his heirs, with Anna, a minor, daughter of his last wife, who had hoped to have no children by him, the free-spoken Lady Restalrig, _née_ Ker (Marion). They, of course, were robbed, by Logan’s forfeiture, of 33,000 marks, owed to Logan by Dunbar and Balmerino. Meanwhile, just after Logan’s death, in autumn 1606, Sprot forges Letters I, II, III, IV, V, and the torn letter, with two compromising letters to Bower, two to Ninian Chirnside, and an ‘eik,’ or addition, of compromising items to a memorandum on business, which, in September 1605, Logan gave to Bower and John Bell before he started for London and Paris. All these documents, the plot-letters, I, II, III, IV, V, and the rest (which lie before me),